Salve! Hello, and welcome to another edition of Monstra Mihi Pecuniam, the semi-regular column where we take ancient Latin wisdom and apply it to everyday life.

To recap our past few episodes, we discussed important philosophical axioms such as Calvo turpuis est nihil comato, Vescere bracis meis and that old Latin classic, Noli habere bovis, vir.

This week we're looking at that old chestnut from Enlightenment philosophy, Esse Est Percipi, which roughly translated means: If a tree falls in a forest and nobody is there to hear it, it actually doesn't make a sound.

The Sony WI-1000X noise-cancelling earbuds Supplied

And, as we do every week, we are asking: how can I apply this important Latin phrase to my choice of noise-cancelling headphones this holiday season?

But the nexus between the Enlightenment philosophy of Bishop George Berkeley and the latest in noise-cancelling technology might be more readily apparent if I translate his famous Latin phrase slightly differently: if you don't notice an irritating sound until that sound has stopped, was it even irritating in the first place?

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Here in the Digital Life Labs, we're in the process of reviewing Sony's latest noise-cancelling earbuds, the WI-1000X, and comparing them to the classic from the in-ear noise-cancellation genre, the QuietControl 30 from Bose.

And in this process we've noticed something of a conundrum: our labs are full of irritating noises that never irritated us until we wore the Sony earbuds, at which time the noises began to irritate us retrospectively. For example, there's an exhaust fan that keeps going off in the basement of the Labs that, now that I have the Sonys in and can no longer hear it, annoys the hells out of me.

I should explain that the WI-1000X is a pair of in-ear earphones that you hang around your neck, loosely based on Sony's larger, over-the-ear noise-cancelling headphones, the MDR-1000X, one of the best gadgets to come out in 2016.

You may recall that the MDR-1000X (now updated and renamed to the WH-1000X Mark II) were the most technologically sophisticated travel headphones ever to grace our ears. Compared with the other market leader, Bose QuietComfort 35, the Sonys are a shade less comfortable, a shade less stylish, but streets ahead in terms of useful features, such as the ability to quickly fade the volume of anything you are listening to and amplify the voice of anyone unexpectedly talking to you: a feature that anyone who has ever caught a flight will recognise as absolutely brilliant.

In the photo hey might rear up like a snake, but in the wild the WI-1000X won't bite. They're comfortable enough to wear for many hours at a time. Supplied

Well, when it comes to in-ear noise-cancelling devices, the new Sonys have almost exactly those same advantages and disadvantages compared with their Bose equivalents.

The WI-1000Xs are a little less comfortable to wear for long periods than a pair of Bose QuietControl 30s (indeed that comfort gap is slightly more noticeable with the in-ear models than with the over-the-ear models), but both of them are much more comfortable than over-the-ear headphones when you're trying to sleep.

(Together with vastly better portability, sleeping comfort is actually one of the main reasons you'd wear noise-cancelling earbuds rather than headphones. The respective Bose and Sony headphones sound better and have a better battery life than their earbud siblings, but you can sleep on your side with earbuds, especially with the Bose, which don't jab into your ear at all when you lie on them, whereas the Sony earbuds jab in a little.)

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And, like their bigger siblings, the Sony earbuds are probably not quite as stylish as the Bose, either. The part that hags around your neck looks like a fashion accessory with the Bose, but with the Sony it looks like something an astronaut might wear.

In the box you get a travel pouch, a cable for plugging into a regular headphone jack, and an adaptor for the stupid headphone jacks on planes. Supplied

But, on the other hand, oh boy do the Sony earbuds have a lot of useful features that you don't know the Bose are missing until you try the Sonys.

Some of the nifty new features, we weren't able to review and, like a tree not falling in a forest, we're not even sure we would have noticed them even if we had been able to review them.

Chief amongst these is a new air-pressure feature, that changes the way the earbuds sound when you're at altitude. We reviewed the WI-1000Xs here in the labs, with the air pressure at a predictable 1 atmosphere, so we don't know what difference the feature makes at higher altitudes, if any.

It stands to reason that lower-pressure air would carry sound differently (for what is sound if not vibrations of air?), but I can't say it's something I've ever noticed in all my decades of air travel. Perhaps I would only notice the difference between high- and low-altitude sound retrospectively, when it was gone.

But some of the features that the Sony has, that are missing from the Bose, are immediately noticeable.

Chief amongst these is the fact that the WI-1000X come with a cable that on one end plugs into the device's USB charging port and on the other end plugs into a regular 3.5mm headphone jack. This jack, in turn, plugs into a two-pronged airplane audio adaptor, meaning you can use the earbuds to listen to the in-flight entertainment system.

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To do the same with the Bose QuietControl 30, you'd have to buy a portable Bluetooth audio transmitter and plug that into the armrest. There is no way to plug the Bose earbuds into anything other than power.

Noise cancelling is another area where Sony has the edge over Bose. Not only is the noise cancelling slightly better on the WI-1000X (though they're both excellent, and more than good enough), you also have the ability with the Sonys to quickly turn the noise cancelling off, and amplify the ambient sound, should someone approach you and start talking.

There's a button right on the end of the astronaut necklace that switches from noise-cancelling mode, to a mode that actually amplifies ambient sound, so you can hear people speak to you even with the earbuds plugging up your ears.

On the Bose, you can press a button 12 times to turn the noise-cancellation from maximum to minimum, but it's nowhere near as convenient and it still doesn't amplify ambient noise.

When paired with a mobile phone, the Sony WI-1000X has another feature that is quite useful that works quite well: using the phone's GPS and accelerometer, it can figure out what activity you're engaged in, and adjust the balance between noise cancelling and ambient-noise amplification accordingly.

Sitting here at my desk writing to you, the Sony earbuds are in "Staying" mode, with noise cancellation set to maximum so I can't hear that now-very-annoying fan in the basement. But if I get up and go for a walk on the street, by the time I get to the front door they'll have switched to "Walking" mode, which amplifies ambient sound so I don't get hit by a truck.

It may not seem like a big thing, until you don't get hit by a truck and it suddenly is.

Or, as we like to say in Latin, Te audire no possum. Musa sapientum fixa est in aure.